


The Region of the Heart

by Gairid



Category: Vampire Chronicles - All Media Types, Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-03
Updated: 2010-03-03
Packaged: 2017-10-07 16:42:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/67035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gairid/pseuds/Gairid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Louis reflects on his past just after his reunion with Lestat and immediately before the infamous concert.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Region of the Heart

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The Region of the Heart

  


**  
** _"I allowed myself to forget how totally I had fallen in love with Lestat's iridescent eyes, that I'd sold my soul for a many-colored and luminescent thing, thinking that a highly reflective surface conveyed the power to walk on water._  


** _What would Christ need to have done to make me follow Him like Matthew or Peter? Dress well to begin with. And have a luxurious head of pampered yellow hair."_ **

A decade had passed since I said those words to the boy I'd set out to kill in a San Francisco alley. A little less than that since my words had come out in print, given to the public at large as fiction, touted as 'Unrelentingly erotic...sometimes beautiful and always frightening' and other such praise. Since then I have been a target of sorts—I'd seen the threatening messages in those places where vampires sometimes gather. I had long since learned to shield their voices so that I would not hear them grating in my head—they had, after all, been pursuing me in some form or other since I had destroyed the Théâtre des Vampires

The lead in to those sentences had been about Madeleine, the only child I'd made alone, how I held so little compassion in my heart or memory for her. How I had supposed that my own emotions regarding my brother's death had been the only true ones, discounting the grief that had driven her to wish a deathless child with whom she would kill human beings for an eternity of nights. It was Armand's will that steered the decision though I did not know that at first; he told me so soon after. It's not much of a stretch, then, to see why I held no real feeling for her.

Claudia had been correct about my wish to leave. What she did not understand was how my love for her had been corrupted by what at that time I had believed was Lestat's death and my own failure to prevent it. To be sure, I was infatuated with the idea of Armand and he became a reason, something to pin a hope to in those nights after I'd turned Madeleine and lingered there in the miniature world she had created for Claudia. Claudia's distrust of Armand had enervated me yet in hindsight she had been right about him.

I'd said to Claudia that my capitulation to her request made us even for that night I had burned from myself the last vestige of what I thought of as my humanity. What was left, then? Self-revulsion. Something like hatred for her, little golden beauty, worse...something like indifference. The night that I'd followed them both to Madeleine's doll shop, Armand's sudden reappearance awakened a shuddering need to find something—anything that might give the endless nights some meaning. For a brief time I'd felt love for Armand even if it was under pressure; he had shown me, at least, what devastating effects my passivity had engendered.

What I had thought I felt, hatred or ambivalence, it all evaporated when Santiago bowed toward that shaft, candle in hand and I entered to see poor Madeleine burnt and ghastly, only her beautiful red hair intact, arms holding onto nothing, though the net of Claudia's golden hair covered her twisted, blackened shoulders. There was nothing else left of Claudia; her body had gone to ash and the disturbance of even that by Santiago's boot had been insupportable, a torment I did not think I would survive.

I had, of course.

All of this is laid out in that tome, distorted and colored as it is with my frustrations as well as the secret, urgent need for contact. Lestat was alive and I knew it—what better way to find him than to throw down an irresistible challenge? His gloved slap was returned in his own missive, far gentler that I perhaps deserved, for his tale held more truth than mine had even though so much was left unsaid. His reproof since has covered the range from amused to incensed to a somehow innocent puzzlement. It is useless to wish now that I should have tried to put more thought into trying to see why he withheld so much from me instead of judging him as I had. I expect that my passivity fostered his impatience and goaded his need for control. I knew so little about him that I did, for a while, believe he had turned me in order to possess my properties. I think, perhaps, I was more afraid of the idea that he wished possession of me. I see it all as so utterly ridiculous now. Why else had I accepted his invitation? Why else but because I wanted nothing more than to be possessed and, in turn, to possess him?

That was the rub. The reciprocal possession. How we managed to actually come together again is nothing short of a miracle, really. Our early life was built upon suspicion and yearning and individual pride that allowed no bending. He will say often that I have very little in the way of ego but he is wrong – my pride was seated in grief, the death of my brother that had been preceded by so much sorrow and the fact that I had indeed killed him. You may read that as you wish—it was a long time ago and the right or wrong of that time has had repercussions that I had not foreseen or even thought of then.

It is wearing. It was always wearing but things have changed and I am no longer the passive being that I was then unless it should serve me in dealing with my mercurial, volatile Lestat; I thought he was lost to me once and the horror of that time was in part predicated upon my inaction. I am determined that it will not be so this time.

"How did you find me?" he'd asked on that night at the Sonoma compound.

"You wanted me to." I'd answered. It was true enough, after all. He said in his book _'I think that to be this happy is to be miserable, to feel this much satisfaction is to burn.'_

To continue. Lestat has forgiven me the past for the most part as I have him. His part in Claudia's death came at the whisper of careless words and these I read for the first time in his book. He had said to me over and over that he wished only to speak with me. I should have paid attention. I should have heard him.

There is still much that lies between us. He has so little concept of privacy when it comes to me—that possessiveness again—and he will push and prod and poke until we are both enraged, he with jealousy that is unfounded and I at the suffocation his anxiety causes. My time with Armand gnaws at his nature with little rat teeth; anger has ever been a weakness of his and I am under no illusion that we will be sailing anything but turbulent seas for some time.

He has returned from his early evening prowl—I hear him humming under his breath and I hear his leather boots creaking as he walks. His iridescent eyes still enthrall; he still dresses well and his pampered yellow hair is a blessing under my hands.

 

FIN


End file.
